Tag Archives: hardtack

Well on my adventure to find the “perfect” picture of what the Union soldiers called Skillygalee I came up empty. As this has never happened to me before, I am quite dismayed by this. HOWEVER, we are in luck that I am persistant. Through many hours of this link, leading to that link, and so on, I was able to find some pictures that I think will give you a pretty good idea of what the Union was cooking up.

The Commissary Department had responsibilities. Their duty was to buy, store, and delivery food to the soldiers. It wasn’t the easiest job, yet the North did have an advantage over their counterpart, South, as they already had a commissary established prior to the onset of the Civil War. Even with the advantage, both sides faced difficulties with supply and demand. One was the inability to preserve food (like we do today), and the other was delivery time.